Lunar Lighting

“Javier Mariscal is a nonconformist,” Danilo De Rossi, the creative director of Leucos, says of the Spanish designer he commissioned to create the new Solea lamp. “Maybe it’s because his background is in animation and graphics. He has created this wonderful iconography, these distinctive images that are so inventive.” De Rossi asked Mariscal, who was nominated for an Academy Award for animation this year, to extend his unique style to lighting design. Solea was born from a vision of sunflower petals overlapping in daylight, but Mariscal reined himself in with a monochromatic color scheme and the use of hand-rolled glass. Despite a name suggesting sunshine, the final lamp has a distinctly lunar quality. Mariscal is already at work on his second design for Leucos, with a more expansive brief. “This time, we’ve asked him to go completely avant-garde,” De Rossi says, “to go completely out there.”